Saturday, November 14, 2009

Bob was a friend-of-a-friend. The friend who introduced us was a co-worker of my ex-husband Doug. Let's call him PV. PV was a social engineer long before Facebook. He absolutely loved creating connections between people. "Oh, do you know so-and-so? Let me introduce you." I think PV envisioned his friends as a collection, all displayed together artfully on a shelf. The only problem was, many of PV's friends had strange quirks, and they didn't mix well together. PV was the sort of person who could subtly alter his personality to harmonize with whoever he was spending time with at the moment. Not everyone can do this. So PV's attempts to create little subsets of friends usually failed in the end. There was the added factor of PV's propensity toward gossip. If he could get friend A to move in with friend B, sooner or later he'd do his very best to get the "dirt" on friend A from friend B or vice versa.

Doug and I moved from New York to Atlanta in the mid-1980s, and PV followed a few months later, for the same reason we did: job changes and a lower cost of living. PV lived with us for a few months, then got his own place. After a few years, he met the lady he later married. She was an eminently level-headed and sensible person, but even she needed a few years to wean PV off his never-ending frat party, the mad social carousel.

PV came to like the south quite a bit and did his best to persuade his old NY friends to relocate. A few did, but most either declined, or they moved briefly to Georgia, found it very much not to their liking, and high-tailed it back to the frozen north. Bob the Polish Porn Enthusiast belonged in the latter category.

I call him the Polish Porn Enthusiast, not as a joke, but because he made a point of building an identity around his ethnic heritage. He was a native New Yorker but the first generation of his family to be born in the US. After PV moved out, and about a year and a half before our son was born, Bob moved in with us. He decorated his bedroom and bathroom with Polish flags, old Bobby Vinton album covers, travel posters, and a homemade family tree populated by individuals with many, many consonants in their names. His favorite actress was Meryl Streep because she did such a good job using a Polish accent in Sophie's Choice. He also bought every Basia CD he could find and played them at top volume whenever he was home. Periodically, when we had occasion to converse, he'd bring a Basia CD upstairs and say "You like her? I like her. She's Polish. You can borrow this anytime you like." Since Basia's music was very hot on all the radio stations at the time, I had no need to borrow the CD and told him no thank you on at least three different occasions.

Bob had a girlfriend who lived in NY but visited him whenever she could. On these occasions, Bob would invariably excuse himself from whatever conversation or activity he might be engaged in with us, grasp his girlfriend by the hand and say "We're gonna go take a nap now." Bob and his girlfriend took lots of naps. They were probably the most well-rested couple in all of Cobb County.

It wasn't long before the subject of pornography began to materialize in our conversations with Bob. He didn't bring up this subject while his girlfriend was visiting, but once she had gone back to New York, he made it clear that her absence necessitated his finding "an outlet." Doug and I soon found plenty of excuses to avoid the downstairs portion of the house where Bob lived. If I were doing laundry and needed to use the bathroom, I'd go all the way upstairs to use ours. In Bob's bathroom was a 3-foot-high stack of porno magazines. Not Playboy, Penthouse, or even Hustler or Screw. Bob's taste ran to what he referred to as "specialty" or "connoisseur" publications. Much more expensive than run-of-the-mill stuff, he informed us. Having seen Hustler and Screw once or twice, Doug and I wondered what could possibly render those "run-of-the-mill" by comparison. But we didn't wonder enough to try checking it out. We just stayed away from Bob's space. Still, all we had to do was stand in front of his bedroom door when he opened it to notice similarly impressive stacks of "literature" populating the floor of that room, too. We wondered where he managed to hide it when the girlfriend came to visit. She was a nursing student, but she gave the impression of being very much in the conventional range of things. Not the type who would turn a blind eye to a library of porn.

Bob got himself a job at the same retail establishment where PV worked. Bob soon managed to irritate everyone at the store, and had a similar effect on Doug and me, even aside from his taste in reading material. Bob considered himself an expert on home design and frequently criticized everything from the doorknobs to the sink drains in our house. He had a withering opinion of our subdivision: "Not private enough. I want a house way out in the country on a dirt road with a big dog guarding it. I want to work on my car and have different cars to work on in the yard and make some money, without the neighbors giving me a hard time."

Uh-huh. Within a couple of months, we realized we couldn't stand the guy and would gladly forsake the nominal rent payments in exchange for a Bobless life. We got our wish once the store cut him loose; he decided he felt more "at home" in New York. Besides, he told us, the South simply provided too few Polish people and too little "good" pornography. We breathed a sigh of relief as he departed, but were soon preoccupied with the pending arrival of our baby. We had a house to prepare: Bob's old room would be turned into an office so that Wally could have the second bedroom upstairs for a nursery. There was a lot of cleaning, painting and rearranging to do. In the midst of this, I found what looked like a box in the vanity drawer of one of the bathrooms. Lifting it out, I determined that it was actually a large hardcover book. No printing on the cover. A quick perusal of the pages revealed some full-color "connoisseur"-type porn. But because it was in the upstairs bathroom, I let myself assume that Doug had put it there, and remained skeptically amused when he denied that he had. A month or two later, Doug found a stack of magazines in the vanity cabinet in our bathroom. He was clearly annoyed, and at last I believed that the book had not been placed there by him. But if not, who? I was so naive, so ready to assume that everybody shared our sense of boundaries, that it took an amazingly long time before I figured out that Bob had gone through the house while we were at work, scattering these little "treats" here and there like a sicko Santa. Evidently, he could think of no finer parting gift for us, his indulgent hosts.

Now, more than two decades later, I know my life experience has broadened and the naïveté has diminished. I've seen enough of humanity to be a lot less surprised when others' habits and values go forth on a path divergent from mine. But, one way or another, it comes down to knowing one's self and what one likes. Open-minded is one thing, but there's no point in saying "Oh, that's fine, no problem" when your heart and mind are saying something quite different. We were glad to see the last of Bob. Eventually, we parted ways with PV as well, having little confidence in his discernment or his inability to resist orchestrating bizarre social arrangements such as the Bob Adventure.

When I first looked at the title, I thought it was about "Polish" Porn. Then, as I read it, I realized that it was NOT about "Polish" PORN, but about a Porn Enthusiast who WAS "Polish" and reminded me of Quagmire from "Family Guy" (giggedy, giggedy).Great story. Disinfectant, anyone?

My Liberal Identity:

You are a Reality-Based Intellectualist, also known as the liberal elite. You are a proud member of what’s known as the reality-based community, where science, reason, and non-Jesus-based thought reign supreme.

A Brief Note

I include a neurodiversity category here because throughout my first 4 grades of school I was frequently referred to the school psychologist and, for lack of a better way to put it, treated like a freak. I had a lot of trouble paying attention and my social skills were sorely lacking. The situation got better but didn't completely clear up during adulthood. I frequently felt that "something was wrong" with me. My parents were alcoholics, and the typical secrecy about family life was also a factor.
Once I got comfortable on the Internet, I began researching on my own, first ruling out autism/ Asperger's (though that took a few years), then Fragile X (which I have never been tested for -- women show far fewer signs and I do have several of the physical markers), and finally concluded that most of my troubles had to do with attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder. That's where I am right now. But the most important thing I've discovered is that genuine freaks are extremely rare and possibly non-existent. We all have "something wrong" with us, and the best thing we can do is adapt -- to ourselves as well as to others. That is why I include these blogs in my list.